The whole album, from 1974, is a treat. Here’s another cut. And another. And another. …
Month: January 2023
Step, child
Hoo, the sun hits the deck fast in the afternoons come January.
I burned the best part of today’s daylight doing chores. Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster needed her registration renewed, which means she needed an emissions check, and we oldsters don’t like going to the doctor if nothing is visibly broken and/or leaking crucial fluid. One suspects a fishing expedition.
Nevertheless, we went, and she got a clean bill of health and two years’ worth of driving privileges in The Great State of New Mexico and wherever its plates are honored.
Then I rang up our HVAC people to discuss some repairs to the combo unit on the roof at El Rancho Pendejo, and it turned out that they could handle the job right then and there rather than next week. So, yeah, by all means, take my money, please, we like being warm in winter.
The work completed, and the ugly topic of money and its distribution having arisen, Herself and I discussed some pressing financial matters. Then it was lunchtime, after which Miss Mia Sopaipilla required some light entertainment, and before you could say, “Sun’s getting a little low in the sky there, Skeeter,” it was a quarter after three in the peeyem and I had taken no exercise. None. Zee-ro.
I almost blew it off. Almost. But Herself had just told me a horrific tale about someone’s 70-something mom who was in a state of collapse and bound for The Home if she couldn’t walk 10 steps, and those financial matters we had been discussing concerned who gets what when I croak.
Not today, goddamnit. I got my 10 steps in before sundown. The Home ain’t getting me today, and neither is the Devil.
Heart full of soul
Jeff Beck has left the building.
I seem to remember catching him and Foghat at the City Aud in Bibleburg when I was a Mad Pup, not yet gone full Dog. But I was usually full of those gosh-darned old drugs back then and often saw and heard things that other people swore up and down were not really there.
The Yardbirds were definitely a part of my teenage playlist. And you have to tip your sombrero to a fella who’s down to punch it with Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Keith Moon, and Nicky Hopkins (“Beck’s Bolero”) or slow it down with Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg (“Over the Rainbow”).
But that train was comin’. And Jeff had to get on board.
It never rains, but it pours
Thanks to everyone who has dropped a dime in Charles Pelkey’s GoFundMe tip jar.
As of 8:30 a.m. Dog time the fund was approaching $18,000, which as organizer David Stanley notes represents “a phenomenal level of love, affection, and admiration” for our old Live Update Guy pal.
I’ve added a widget to the sidebar for anyone who missed the memo. And it was delightful to see so many former VeloNews types in the list of donors.
Meanwhile, here in The Duck! City this morning we got a wet little kiss on the cheek from the gods; just enough rain to rinse some dust off the cacti. Thank you, sir or madam, may I have another?
I expect Herself and her pal Leslie are glad they canceled their trip to Southern California, where the rain is washing away the dust, the cacti, the hillsides the cacti are rooted to, and damn nearly everything else. Especially since the FAA developed a hitch in its gitalong, an IT failure of some sort that buggered about 4,600 flights.
That’s a surfin’ safari you can keep, is what. Nobody likes this drought, but who wants to hang ten on their front door while rocketing down a diversion channel to the Rio Grande?
LUG nuttery from days gone by
Editor’s note: While we’re waiting to hear from the man himself, I’ve unearthed a couple moldy oldies — a short video I did for Live Update Guy, and a piece I wrote about Charles “The Big LUG” Pelkey back in 2017, when I still had a column at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. Meanwhile, you can offload your spare change into Mr. P’s Tip Jar at GoFundMe.
• • •
“He shook his head, and as he shook his head, I heard someone ask him, ‘Please, Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles … dance.”—Jerry Jeff Walker, “Mr. Bojangles”
By Patrick O’Grady
This July marked the first time in years that I haven’t been required to follow the Tour de France.
So I didn’t. And it was swell.
Well, mostly.
I’ve spent nearly three decades paddling my little canoe along the bright yellow revenue stream of the Tour without ever having to visit its source in France, which I hear is quite a drive from Albuquerque, even in a Subaru.
The Tour got me into bicycle racing in the Eighties, and bicycle racing got me out of the newspaper business in the Nineties, before The Suits declared open season on copy editors.
Fight or flight? Flight, I thought as I hit the door running, and when does the beverage cart come around? Make mine a double. Anybody who thinks a pan-flat, 200km sprinters’ stage in the Tour is dull never edited a school-board story at 10:30 p.m., when sensible people are already half in the bag.
But even the Tour loses its kick after a while. And so, after Charles Pelkey and I agreed to leave his Live Update Guy project parked for 2017, I celebrated by stuffing part of a bike and all of my left hand into a trailside cholla.
Funny money. Of all the things I’ve done for money, Live Update Guy scores way up there on the fun meter.
This odd little enterprise came about in “Let’s put on a show!” fashion, a la Busby Berkeley’s “Babes in Arms.” Or maybe Monty Python’s “The Crimson Permanent Assurance” would be closer to the mark.
Charles had been handling live updates and other chores for a Boulder-based cycling enterprise until he got a pink slip and a black diagnosis more or less simultaneously in 2011, two days after the Tour wrapped.
The one-two punch of unemployment and breast cancer couldn’t keep him down, though. He put his University of Wyoming law degree to work full time, eventually becoming a co-founder of the Laramie firm Neubauer, Pelkey and Goldfinger, LLP.
But Charles still enjoyed following pro cycling, and while undergoing chemotherapy he hung out another shingle, LiveUpdateGuy.com, and called the 2011 Vuelta a España—supported not by advertising, or vulture capitalists, but by his readership.
Like Mr. Bojangles, Charles was dancing for tips.
Hey-o! I joined the show in 2012, but Charles was the star, and rightly so.
For starters, he had actually been to all three grand tours, performing feats of journalism. In this new role, he arose at stupid-thirty for the start of nearly every stage of nearly every GT, and generally carried on till the bitter end, then popped back in later to add results for the data-obsessed.
I generally clocked in late to make fart noises, get things wrong, and make people crazy. In other words, same as I do here.
This has its limits, as you know. If Charles had lawyering to do and left the keys to the joint with me, eyeballs and donations dropped off accordingly. Nobody turned on the “The Tonight Show” to watch Ed McMahon. They wanted Johnny.
Spare change? We said LUG operated on the NPR model—light on commercials, heavy on beggary—but it was more like busking next to an upturned hat on a downtown sidewalk.
When the act was good, we got paid. Not so good, not so paid. It was an astoundingly libertarian business model for two old commies, though there was a Marxist overlay; we didn’t bounce anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
We got a big assist from the audience, which included an actual monsignor at the actual Vatican who proved a prodigious daily essayist; a generous East Coast equestrian with a crush on Peter Sagan; and a poet laureate who affected the guise of a herring-mad penguin.
“I’d say that some of my favorite memories involve the family that we created out of that site,” said Charles. “They are a wonderful group of people. It’s been a privilege to get to know a lot of them.”
It’s … Monty Liggett. When action was slow on the road, LUG served up running gags (Monty Python and various Liggettisms were in heavy rotation).
So, too, were clubby and impenetrable acronyms like HWSNBN (“He Who Shall Not Be Named,” for a certain Texan), and NRRBBB (“Non-Race-Related Blah-Blah-Blah”), in which some critics argued we indulged too freely.
But when you have the effrontery to provide live commentary on a grand tour from start to finish, and from the wrong side of the pond, with few resources beyond unreliable video feeds and your equally dubious wits, it’s hard not to tumble into the ditch of digression now and then.
Some days trying to keep it between the ditches felt an awful lot like work. So, with Charles now a legislator as well as a lawyer—he won election to the state legislature in 2015—and me wanting to ride a bike in the early morning before the Duke City desert starts to smoke, it seemed wise to take a break this time around.
Maybe not, though. Because if we had been calling the Tour, safe in the ever-lovin’ arms of the LUG Nuts, I might not have stuck my hand into that damn’ cactus.
• Editor’s note v2.0: This column appeared in the Aug. 1, 2017, issue of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
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